[OS X TeX] possible character-mapping bug in gwTeX

[Maarten Sneep]

On 15 Oct 2005, at 1:21, Christopher Brislawn wrote:

> On 15 Oct 2005, at 00:26:50 CEST, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
> > Not a bug; this is expected behavior, and will be the same in any
> > standard TeX installation on any platform.
>
> Actually, the sample text I sent in compiled and rendered to  
> Postscript "correctly" (i.e., as *I* expected) using my previous  
> workhorse, Y&Y TeX on Win XP (in LaTeX with Lucida fonts).

IIRC Lucida in Y&Y TeX used TeX‘n’ANSI encoding by default (TS1?), or  
at least T1 -- but certainly not the old OT1, which makes it less  
surprising that it worked, because the alternative font encodings try  
to follow US-ASCII much more closely. People writing Spanish texts  
might get a nasty surprise though.

> > <, >, and | do not normally occur in printed English text.
>
> Not counting the usage at the start of the above lines, of course.
> I discovered this problem when I moved my first work-in-progress  
> from the Y&Y setup to the Mac; it contained in-line mathematical  
> jargon of the form "something > something else," which revealed the  
> problem very nicely.

Something $>$ something else. or even $\text{something} > \text 
{something else}$. This even makes it easier to translate $>$ into $ 
\rightarrow$, which probably is even clearer (was something bigger  
than something else, or did something lead to or turn into something  
else?)

> I still think it's bizarre and error-provoking to redefine a  
> standard keyboard character to a different symbol, particularly if  
> it's only done in *some* font styles, and especially when the  
> language has macro capabilities for lesser-used symbols.  I really  
> thought I was losing my mind for a while there....

Don't blame Donald Knuth for starting on TeX before many of the  
standards we take for granted today were finalised. The more modern  
font encoding vectors in TeX map more closely to what many expect. To  
avoid breaking the old documents, it is however not really possible  
to completely replace OT1 by T1.

> Thank you both for responding so promptly!  I never get answers  
> that fast around the workplace.

You're not the first one to be pleasantly surprised.

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